This season, ABC's Lost has employed the "flash-forward." It's a brilliant creative move, but it could it be the network's worst nightmare?

For three seasons, the ABC series Lost used flashbacks to illustrate elements of the narrative the audience never saw. Now they've gone the other way; now they're consistently using flash-forwards to show parts of the story we haven't yet experienced. It's made the series even more interesting than it already was. But something keeps occurring to me: Isn't this a dangerous move on behalf of the producers? They seem to be giving its central cast members the strongest negotiating leverage in TV history.

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Let's say the actor who plays Sayid (Naveen Andrews) suddenly decides to ignore his current contract. Let's say he demands twice as much money as he's scheduled to receive and won't show up for work without it. What could ABC possibly do? They can't just feed him to the smoke monster and write him off the show; we already know he definitely exists in an abstract tomorrow. By actively showing the future, the screenwriters have relinquished their ability to control the present. An even greater (and admittedly morbid) problem would be accidental death: What if Michael Emerson (the actor who portrays Ben) died in a car accident? Would the show simply have to end? How could his absence be reconciled?